His stance just winds me up now. I get his point about subservience. But there are very different market realities now, and it’s always been true that you had people who were accepting and those who were not. There’s also always been that refusal for some people to grapple with risk versus reward. They want publishers to take the risks yet have the rewards for themselves. I personally would like to see the balance shift from where it’s at now, but there’s a level of delusion from some parties as to how far you can go in one direction without dealing with the other.
The characters thing is incoherent. As already said, it’s always about what works for him. Mills fumes when an editor dares do anything to his work, but rewrote other people’s input when he was an editor. And it’s OK for Moore to write Swamp thing, but not for anyone else to write Rogue Trooper? Really? So: no War Machine. No Cinnabar. No Rennie strips in that universe. But disco Rogue is fine, as is all the Re-Gene tosh. OK, then.
Frankly, he’s done rather well out of Rebellion, although he’d never admit it. I can’t think of another writer given such free reign, and whose strips have been ring-fenced—and with, frankly, diminishing returns on some of them. (Mills himself has said as much—that he hasn’t always put in the effort, because he doesn’t believe the return is worth it.) Beyond that, most of what he’s written is collected (yet he gripes that a few things haven’t been) and that Hachette collection is heavily Mills (which was also bad, because it didn’t make him millions). They’re even reprinting fucking Finn, with all its horrible Ike-like vibes.
As for his line “for the Phoenix aimed at Waitrose readers”… Just fuck off. The Phoenix is a superb comic. It has excellent, intelligent, diverse, smart, funny, anarchic, accessible strips. Yes, it’s too expensive to be properly mainstream, but guess what? That’s the market now. Comics aren’t selling in the millions, and we’re never getting back to that place. He’s like an old man shouting at a cloud, which makes me a slightly less old man shouting at an old man shouting at a cloud. Gah.
